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With the rise of an archaic and a barbaric caliphate set up by ISIS, Jim Al-Khalili seeks to show the other side of the Muslim world, to counter Western belief that it is "disengaged from modern science." Indeed, IS leaders deny people they subjugate the pursuit of modern civilisation and attempt to turn the clock of history back to the Middle Ages.Another fact is that rich Muslim countries spend "less than 0.5% of their GDP on research and development, compared with five times that in the advanced economies." This prompts many Muslims to feel snubbed and "indignant when accused of being culturally or intellectually unequipped for competitiveness in science and technology."Although "governments across the Muslim world are increasing their R&D budgets sharply," it doesn't benefit the wider population, because education is not universal and its curriculums have a narrow focus. Wedded to the past, and obsessed with taboos, heresies, the curriculums are unable to produce persons of creative minds and innovative ways of thinking. There is little appreciation for critical thoughts and visionary ideas, and all sorts of freedoms, sciences, inventions and innovations are suppressed and restrained. According to the author, "in many parts of the Muslim world, science faces a unique challenge; it is seen as a secular – if not atheist – Western construct."Perhaps many Muslims haven't been told, or they have forgotten about Iraq's "Golden Age" of science, with Baghdad’s House of Wisdom as this era’s intellectual epicenter a thousand years ago. During the first century after the birth of Islam, Muslim armies defeated the Persians and moved into Iraq. Around 762, the Abbasid caliphs established their capital in Baghdad from where they ruled the vast Muslim empire for the next five centuries. While Europe and scientific progress slumbered in a period known as the Dark Ages, it saw a huge blossoming of science and scholarship in the Islamic world between the "8th and 15th" centuries. It was a period in which the Ummayyad and Abbasid Caliphs created one of the greatest centres of learning the world had ever known - the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.For many thousand years, Iraq was a key centre of scientific knowledge. It comes as no surprise that ISIS sees pre-Islamic history and civilisation as an anathema to its ideology, because ISIS embraces Salafi jihadism, which has its backers among Saudis and other Sunni Arabs in the region. According to the Saudi Wahhabism, the puritanical interpretation of Islam deems the preservation of ancient artefacts and monuments to be a form of idolatry, and sees the worshiping at shrines as apostasy. ISIS had destroyed numerous cultural artefacts and monuments of historic significance in its rampage across Iraq and Syria. The ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia represent some of mankind’s earliest experiments in writing, government, administration, city life, agriculture and engineering. For the Islamic State, any viewpoint inconsistent with the Caliphate’s decrees is a threat to its supreme authority - and must be destroyed. As long as ordinary citizens in the Muslim world don't have access to an education and job opportunities, they fall victims to ISIS recruitment. It doesn't help if "many countries devote an unusually large share of research funding toward military technology," It would not guarantee security. Read more

Can anyone actually show me "brilliant scientific contributions made by Islamic scholars a thousand years ago"?I have searched and searched and have been unable to find one.I find plenty of claims, but no significant inventions or discoveries.All I have managed to find are advancements and modifications, nothing groundbreaking.Also, why do I never hear or Zoroastrian or Rastafarian science or inventions? Why are groundbreaking inventions and discoveries linked to scientific research or a name - never ideologies? Read more

Any house has to have foundations and 0.5% GDP expenditure is unlikely to be enough of a foundation

How anybody can refer back to the middle ages is beyond me, its totally irrelevent and not a foundation for anything. The foundation has to be contemporary. There is no way around it - much of muslim society - despite the odd spot of enlightenment - is fundamentally opposed to progress. The predeliction for public state beheadings by sword in some locations is symbolic in so many ways. How old is that practice Read more

The author's argumentation suffers from two principle faults:1. Despite the knowledge ancient scientist have produced their intellectual framework was utterly different from the modern one, a fact that the work of historians like Anthony Grafton (cf. his book "Cardano's Cosmos") sheds light on. For the renaissance-astrologer Girolamo Cardano there was no contradiction in demanding precise observation and clear mathematical description of the phenomena and at the same time believing that the stars have a real influence on human's fates. In other words: For our ancestors the physical world and the spiritual world were influencing each other, but their respective systems of description did not produce any contradictions for them. That is not the case anymore. So there is no point in drawing on the example of ancient scholars to show the intellectual capacity of a contemporary culture.2. Today we have established a world-wide scientific community. What does that mean? Although we have bright hot spots of scientific work today, too, new scientific knowledge yielded by, say, Japanese, South Korean or Chinese scientists is in principle acknowledged and considered the same way as if it were produced by scientists from Harvard, Oxford, Heidelberg or Paris. If the United States are still in the first flight of scientific progress it is not because of their status as a bright center of the world but because their scientists and institutions prevail in the global competition.So all that Muslim scientists can achieve today is catching up with the scientific community rather than restoring a "Muslim House of Wisdom". It ist their decision to deem that sufficient. If they don't they will fail. Read more

PS On Air: The Super Germ Threat

NOV 2, 2016

In the latest edition of PS On
Air
, Jim O’Neill discusses how to beat antimicrobial resistance, which
threatens millions of lives, with Gavekal Dragonomics’ Anatole Kaletsky
and Leonardo Maisano of
Il Sole 24 Ore.

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